As the Internet and other online access to information continues to grow, users are increasingly presented with an over-abundance of available information content without effective means to manage it (e.g., to identify content that is relevant, accurate and enjoyable). While some systems exist that attempt to locate content of a particular type and to rank available content as to relevance, such as some search engines, the techniques used by such systems have numerous problems. For example, even if a particular technique for ranking identified content was effective, a system using such a technique would still suffer from the difficulty in initially identifying that content as being potentially relevant so that it could be ranked. Moreover, as the number of available sources of content grows (e.g., content from numerous users that generate blogs (or “Web logs”) that may each have multiple distinct blurbs of content that address disparate topics each day), the ability to timely identify and analyze such content further suffers.
One particular example of an increasing source of content relates to merchants that sell items such as products, services, and data via the World Wide Web (“the Web”). It is common for such Web merchants to design their Web sites to display content in order to draw interest to items available from the Web site. As one example of such content, some Web merchants include item reviews on their Web sites, such as to provide additional information about an item. While Web merchants may in some cases pay professional reviewers to prepare item reviews, procuring such reviews can be expensive, and some readers of professional reviews may be distrustful of the evaluation from a professional reviewer.
In other cases, volunteer users of a Web site, such as customers of a merchant's Web site, are solicited to prepare item reviews. While volunteer reviews have advantages over professional reviews in terms of cost and of appeal to some readers, volunteer review programs often have significant disadvantages of their own. For example, it can often be difficult to convince volunteers to prepare item reviews. In addition, many such volunteer reviews may be of little use to other users (e.g., prospective purchasers) for a variety of reasons, such as poor writing and/or analysis, the inclusion of irrelevant and/or inappropriate subject matter, opinions that differ greatly from those of most other users, etc.
In view of the above-discussed disadvantages of identifying content of interest, a more effective approach to identifying useful item reviews and other types of content of interest would have significant utility.